San Francisco Has Money And A New Plan To Tackle Homelessness. Will It Finally Change Things?

Author: The Guardian URL: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/14/san-francisco-homelessness-funding-covid-19 One-line: San Francisco has the money and a plan, but advocates argue that what gets labeled “service-resistance” is really a system designed without dignity for the people it’s meant to serve.

Highlights #Homelessness

• In a city of stark wealth disparities, where new tech millionaires frequently sidestep homeless encampments on their way to patio brunches, homelessness has been among the most stubborn and politically fraught issues, one in which housed voices often overtake unhoused voices in quality-of-life complaints rather than actual solutions.
• In a city with more than 8,000 homeless people at last count, 1,730 people are currently temporarily housed in hotel rooms and up to 260 people live at sanctioned encampments.
• “When we offer you an alternative to sleeping on the streets, we’re not going to let you be comfortable sleeping on the streets,” Breed said. “We’re not going to let you set up a tent and set up shop when we’re giving you a way out.”
• But Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said there were many reasons why an individual would refuse a housing placement. It might not be wheelchair accessible. It might separate that person from a loved one. It might not allow a pet that became like that person’s family on the streets. “When representatives of the system say people are service-resistant, what it should be read as is a system failure,” she said. “The system is failing to adequately serve a person.” #Service Design
• Smith continued: “One guy even had the nerve to shout to me, ‘Lady, you have to stay off the dope’ as to why I was crying hysterically. No, I wasn’t crying hysterically because I was high on dope. I was crying hysterically because you were treating me like I was nothing and you’re acting like you’re enjoying it.”

Connections

• Service Design — the central reframe: “service-resistance” read as system failure, a design problem in how the city serves unhoused people.
• Homelessness — San Francisco as a case study in a well-funded but stubbornly unsolved urban problem.